[Info-vax] MariaDB (Re: OT: what is old is new again?)

[Neil Rieck]

On Wednesday, May 4, 2016 at 4:52:17 PM UTC-4, David Froble wrote:
> Craig A. Berry wrote:
> > On 5/1/16 1:48 PM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> > 
> >> We're currently running MariaDB-5.5-25 which can outperform ISAM RMS
> > 
> >> They give it away but sell support
> >> contracts. But they do not offer something for OpenVMS which means we
> >> must rely on someone "to provide us with a build" or "do a build
> >> ourselves". Now I asked that single provider if he was willing to sell
> >> us a support contract and responded as not being interested in doing 
> >> this.
> > 
> > 
> >> So for me I can only see two options.
> >>
> >> 1) develop a fallback strategy based upon Mimer
> >  >
> >> 2) hope that someone at VSI is considering doing a MariaDB build
> > 
> > 
> > And of course "doing a build" would be of limited help with your
> > situation unless they were also going to offer support for it, right?
> > 
> > At a TUD a few years ago, someone asked about OpenVMS Engineering
> > providing support for MySQL and the HP person present said, "Why do you
> > want us to do it?". Apparently that was a rhetorical question as he
> > didn't wait for an answer. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the
> > reason people want support for open source packages from the purveyor of
> > VMS is that no one else is offering it.
> 
> Well, it seems like an opportunity to me.  For example, I believe it's Mark 
> Berryman who is building MarieDB for VMS.  If VSI decided to distribute the 
> product as part of VMS, and partnered with Mark to provide support, and made 
> sure customers had easy methods of obtaining such support, ...
> 
> The "vendor" would perhaps have a sufficient revenue stream from support to 
> insure the resources for such support.
> 
> Or, SQlite, or Postgre, or ...
> 
> The key would be for VSI to pick one or more RDBMS products and make it happen.

Let me second those remarks:

First off, while I have been using Mark's port of MariaDB-5.5-25 since 2014, we have noticed a few issues. When you check the blogs most people say something like "Oh, that problem went away when we upgraded to MariaDB-10.1"

I understand Mark works for a division of HP/HPE that is being outsourced so he is very busy doing work that results in putting food on the table. That said, with no version of MariaDB-10 on the horizon for OpenVMS, I have resorted to installing CentOS Linux on a nearby server, then installing MariaDB-10.1.19 which we access from our OpenVMS development platform via the network. (think of this experiment as an alternative form of SAN; I did this only to see if our issues just went away, which they did)

I'm not certain what the open source community did between MariaDB-5 and MariaDB-10 but everyone claims it is faster and we noticed this as well.

We are at a point where 50% of our OpenVMS data still remains on RMS and we would like to move it to MariaDB but do not want to be trapped in a single-source situation. (which VSI could solve by including MariaDB with OpenVMS; or we could solve by sticking with the Linux alternative); our only other alternative is to investigate something like Mimer:
http://developer.mimer.com/platforms/index.tml )

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

p.s. do not think that SQLite is a viable alternative to MySQL, MariaDB or Postgres. While SQLite it is very powerful from a single user perspective, it introduces some new issues when used in a multi-user environment. That said, I play with it every day and believe it to be a viable alternative to small RMS-based ISAM projects. I have posted my efforts here: 
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/openvms_notes_sqlite.html